In recent years, power storage devices such as lithium-ion secondary batteries, lithium-ion capacitors, and air cells have been developed.
An electrode for the power storage device is manufactured by providing an active material over a surface of a current collector. As a negative electrode active material, a material which can occlude and release ions functioning as carriers (hereinafter referred to as carrier ions), such as carbon or silicon, is used. For example, silicon or phosphorus-doped silicon can occlude about four times as many carrier ions as carbon and thus has higher theoretical capacity than carbon and is advantageous in increasing the capacity of the power storage device.
However, when the amount of carrier ions which are occluded is increased, the volume of an active material greatly changes in accordance with occlusion and release of carrier ions in charge/discharge cycle, resulting in lower adhesion between a current collector and silicon and deterioration in battery characteristics due to charge/discharge. Accordingly, a layer formed using silicon is formed over a current collector and a layer formed using a graphite is formed over the layer formed using silicon, thereby reducing deterioration in battery characteristics due to expansion and contraction of the layer formed using silicon (see Patent Document 1).
Silicon has lower electric conductivity than carbon; thus, by covering surfaces of silicon particles with a graphite and forming an active material layer including the silicon particles over a current collector, a negative electrode in which the resistivity of the active material layer is reduced is manufactured.
In recent years, the use of a graphene as a conductive electronic material in semiconductor devices has been studied. A graphene refers to a sheet of carbon molecules with a thickness of one atomic layer having double bonds (also referred to as graphite bonds or sp2 bonds).
A graphene is chemically stable and has favorable electric characteristics and thus has been expected to be applied to channel regions of transistors, vias, wirings, and the like included in the semiconductor devices. In addition, particles of an active material are covered with a graphite or a graphene in order to increase the conductivity of a material for an electrode in a lithium-ion battery (see Patent Document 2).
Further, in a power storage device, a positive electrode and a negative electrode are each provided with a plurality of protrusions so as to increase the capacity; in such a power storage device, a top portion of each of the plurality of protrusions of the positive electrode and the negative electrode is provided with an insulator in order to reduce pressure applied to a separator between the electrodes when the volume of the electrodes increases owing to charge/discharge (see Patent Documents 3 to 5).